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Non casual genre will become popular for mobile games

Jae-jun Song, VP of Gamevil, said “Smartphone games are heading to Non-Casual genre. It will become a main trend for the year 2012” for the keynote speech at 2012 Smart&Social Game Party in Seoul.

He said casual games like ‘Angry Birds’ are the leading force of the smartphone game market until now. However, non-casual games and big name titles have been introduced more and more and got loved by users. He added “Normally when a new platform comes up, casual games become popular in the beginning. However, if the platform gets matured, non-casual games are increased gradually. Since non-casual games have high ARPU usually, we think they will become a main trend for 2012.”

In addition, he told that the other mainstream will be F2P. He said even though we still have many smartphone games to purchase, F2P games is the mainstream now in fact. 71% of the total revenue of Gamevil comes out from in-game purchase. It was 43% in 2010 and it will be growing much larger in 2012.

The scale of global mobile game market is about $9.3 billion according to the report from Nomura group. Korean mobile game market size is about 3% ($298 million) of it. However, the market grows 52% comparing to the last year. It makes Korean mobile game market as the fastest growing market in the world.

Since the category for games were allowed at Apple App Store and Google Play last year, the time to play mobile games reaches 20% of PC games playing.
Gamevil will focus its resources on the global mobile game market. Even though Korea is the fastest growing mobile game market, their customers are mostly from abroad. Gamevil broke the the record of 100 million accumulated download number in March – 44million from Apple App Store, 36million from Google Play, 22 million from Korean local open market such as T-Store etc.

Especially, Gamevil will focus on china and Japan, which the popularity of games are not decided by the popularity in North America.